Monday, October 20, 2008

Taking down the house...

Posted April 14th, 2008 by phillau

Hey guys! I won I won! i know it's getting repetitive but I'm totally loving it! I took down the top prize of the 19-handed rebuy live tournament. We were down to 3-handed when we decided that I could take 1st place with a $20k HKD prize money, and 2nd and 3rd will chop roughly $12k each. I also won the $1000 bonus for knocking out the most players (I knocked out 5), and I won two last longer prop bets. All in all, a very fruitful night.

I'm very proud to say that I made zero crucial mistake in this tournament. I mean, obviously I've lost pots, but I've played no hand wrong nor have I lost any that were damaging to my stack or my chipleader status. Oh, and about the chiplead, I was the chipleader right when the rebuy period was over, and then there was no looking back. I rallied my way onto the final table, and there I took advantage of my big stack well and took down a lot of blinds and antes. I owned half of the total chips in play when we were down to 4-handed.

In addition to the fundamental gameplay, my read was very accurate for the night. On one particular hand, I was in the small blind with 78o, I was the chipleader and the only limper got nearly as big a stack as I did. I picked up a tell on him when he read his cards. Gut feeling tells me that he's not super strong, ie not pocket pairs. Being my tricky self, I min-raised it to 400 (on 100/200 blinds). Big blind folded as expected, and limper called. I checked dark before the flop was dealt, and the flop shows 26T rainbow. I had a gutshot straight draw. Limper made a pot sized bet of 1000, and i paused a little and then raised all in. This was for all of his chips people, and he had a pretty healthy stack. There's no way he could call. This is a very advanced play here, it's 90% based on my read on the limper, but if he calls I'm still live. He went into the tank and after at least three minutes of contemplation, he laid his hand down. What I'm trying to show here is, the play I made was decided even before the first raise was made. It really didn't matter what the guy had, he's folding it.

I'll try to compare my combo moves to the Street Fighter game. (For all of you who doesn't play the game, bare with me...) By min-raising him, it's like I threw a probing jab to take out some of his possible hands. He, by not reraising or folding, was clearly not on any pair nor any extreme rags. Then I checked in the dark. This is like a block or parry to slow down and let him hit into you. And then comes the big Super. By going all in, I gave him no choice but to lay it down and hand the pot to me. I would recommand anyone who wants to try this out to be extremely selective with your hand and your opponent, but when you do make a move, please do me a favor and don't get cold-feeted.

For the coming week there'll be a $20k HKD guaranted tournament which will happen on Saturday, April 19th. I'll be playing, and better yet, there will be a $1000 bounty on my head. So please sign up here (http://poker.meetup.com/1573/calendar/7683228/) if you wanna take a stab at it! As always I will accept any $500 or $1000 last-longer prop bets. Please post here for the prop bets.